Airships using the lifting force of a buoyant gas are well known from the prior art. There are known in particular dirigible crafts of various designs intended for transporting people and cargoes, as well as for carrying out meteorological studies. Besides, various types of dirigibles are widely employed to extinguish fires and to evacuate threatened people from high-rise buildings. In such cases, it is possible to use to this end both soft-envelope dirigibles provided with a nacelle for accommodating people to be evacuated and rigid-hull airships provided with facilities for mooring to the high-rise buildings.
Thus e.g. document RU 2250122 discloses a fire fighting airship comprising a disk-shaped aerostatic body, power plants with a variable thrust vector, a crew cabin with a control system, a landing gear, and a mooring/picketing arrangement. This airship serves to extinguish fires and to localize the flame, in particular when fighting forest fires, range fires and fires occurring in hard-to-reach mountainous regions.
Unfortunately, such airships are not adapted to evacuate people, particularly from high-rise buildings, and, furthermore, they lack suitable arrangements allowing for mooring to the buildings.
Airships used for evacuating people are described e.g. in documents EP 0460909 and BE 1013345 that disclose aerostatic balloons intended to rescue individuals from locations situated well above the ground surface, such as a high-rise building or towers. The balloon may ascend due to filling it with a lighter-than-air gas. While such airships allow people to be evacuated from high-rise buildings, they are not provided with any mooring device, thus rendering difficult the rescuing operations under extreme conditions and in case of severe time constraints. Moreover, such aerostatic balloons suffer from a scarce payload and allow neither evacuating a great number of persons at a time nor transporting oversize cargoes.
Document RU 2337855 discloses a versatile search-and-rescue aircraft usable as a facility for urgently rescuing people, in particular from high-rise buildings. This aircraft comprises a rigid body accommodating hulls with lifting gas, a pilot's cab with airship controls, and a cargo compartment for accommodating cargo and passengers. In the bottom part of the body, there is provided a through longitudinal passage with exit hatches and devices for docking with external objects. In order to rescue persons from premises situated on the upper floors of high-rise buildings, it is necessary to bring the airship into proximity with the window opening, to open the front hatch, to push out the window frame using a telescoping ladder, and finally, to hook the ladder on the window opening. After the airship has been moored, the rescuers and the evacuated people can pass through the ladder into and from the building. The applicant has chosen the airship described in the above-cited document as an analogous technical solution that is closest to the present invention.
While being able to dock with the building walls and having a relatively high payload, such airship suffers at the same time from a number of serious drawbacks. Thus, in particular, this known airship is a heavier-than-air-type aircraft (that is to say, capable of controllably hovering in the air), which requires some space sufficient to its acceleration and take-off. In addition, the above-described design of the docking means is far from being perfect from the standpoint of security to be ensured for the evacuated people. Indeed, in case of evacuating people using the method disclosed in document RU 2337855, the risk is run that the evacuated persons might be injured when pushing out the window frame or panic might arise when people traverse the escape ladder at a significant height over the ground surface. Furthermore, while the payload of the airship under consideration is relatively high with respect to that of the rescue balloons, this payload represents a constant value, no additional means being provided in this airship for increasing it.
It should be also pointed out that in the course of a rescue operation, it may become necessary to resort to supplementary means used traditionally for suppressing fires, or to deliver rescuers, fire-fighters, medical or other personnel to the site of the operation. When using conventional airships, such delivery is only possible by using several airships which are not related with one another in any way. In these circumstances, each of these airships will be the object of a long delicate procedure of mooring to the building where an emergency took place. However, in extreme conditions, and in particular during a fire, the time of carrying out the rescue operation constitutes a critical factor. Besides, in modern megalopolises, the space needed for maneuvering a great number of individual airships between high-rise buildings may be quite restricted. Finally, owing to the lack of possibility of rapidly docking such isolated airships with each other, it is impossible to transfer cargoes and people from one airship to another directly in flight.
Therefore, it is evident from the foregoing that a demand is needed for devising an airship intended for carrying out rescue operations in high-rise buildings, which airship would not require a large space for taking-off and maneuvering and would be capable of ensuring mass evacuation of people from high-rise buildings using a method that is the fastest and the safest for the individuals to be evacuated.
It is a necessity to develop an airship, whose configuration could be varied directly in flight, thus allowing for increasing its payload and for obtaining the possibility of rapidly delivering necessary resources to the rescue place under conditions of restricted space for maneuvering.